The widespread proliferation of content in digital form has presented new opportunities to search for information in a variety of contexts. Besides the ubiquitous Internet search engine, there are other commonplace search tools available to the user. For example, an e-mail application might provide a user with a tool to search for information appearing in a subject heading or in the body of e-mails that the user has sent or received. In a word processing application, a user might use a tool to search for words in the title or body of the documents that the user has created, or to which the user has access. Other kinds of searches might include image searches using metadata associated with the image.
Learning how to use these various search tools can be confusing for the user. For one thing, existing search tools are designed to search specific resources of data under the assumption that the user has already identified a specific resource in which to look—an assumption that is not necessarily true for many users. Knowing where to look can be especially difficult for the user nowadays, as computers are increasingly linked to other computers using the Internet or other types of network. The sheer volume of potential places to look, as well as the amount of data to search once you get there, make it important to search as efficiently as possible. Determining where to look, as well as sorting out which search results are most relevant, can be a daunting task. Furthermore, the determination of the best place to look or the most relevant result may change rapidly, making it difficult to keep searches both relevant and efficient.
Another problem with existing search tools is that each search tool has a different interface that the user must learn in order to find what he or she is looking for. For example, the Search command under the Windows XP™ operating system invokes a “search companion” to guide a user through a search in a manner that is completely different from the Search command under the Microsoft Word® word processing program, which prompts the user with a tabbed search dialog box.
There have been previous efforts to simplify searches for users, but those efforts have fallen short of meeting users' needs. For example, in the Internet search engine context, Web sites that allow users to type a search term in once and then simultaneously invoke several different search engines were once popular. But such Web sites provide no further assistance to the user to effectively search the most relevant content or to sort out the most relevant results from the various searches. Indeed, such Web sites potentially complicate the task for the user as more results are returned than when using a single search engine.